"For about AU$70 and a thumbprint you can now become an e-resident of Estonia. It's the first country in the world to offer what it calls a digital identity to foreigners. Some people say it may be the beginning of the end of the nation state."

"Before email, faculty meetings, international colloquia, and professional associations, the world of scholarship relied on its own networks: networks of correspondence that stretched across countries and continents; the social networks created by scientific academies; and the physical networks brought about by travel. These networks were the lifelines of learning, from the age of Erasmus to the age of Franklin. They facilitated the dissemination&emdash;and the criticism&emdash;of ideas, the spread of political news, as well as the circulation of people and objects."

"We are at a juncture in the story of humanity. The decisions we make and the systems we build in the next twenty years will determine not just whether we live free from the boot of repressive dictatorships, but whether we live at all. The way out lies through hope, empathy, and learning to think like our systems -- through becoming creatures of the network."

"Social media (and twitter in particular) is driven by the desire to see, and to be seen. It’s a public mixture of bravado and stalking, gossip and dissemination. But underneath all that is a desire to connect, to feel part of a larger tribe.

More than anything we like to be ‘liked’ – that thrill when there are unread @ replies in our Twitter feed, or when someone ‘favourites’ our latest witticism. We love any evidence that someone is paying attention.

This project aims to expose the subtle relationship between this human need – to be interacted with and liked – and the ramifications of expressing ourselves on an infrastructure that never forgets.

"If you float the theory that "younger users don't like the feeling of being alone. They want to be tethered to their friends constantly," important venture capitalists will invest in your app. It doesn't even need to solve that problem."

"There are a lot of brightly lit glossy surfaces, yet they don’t reveal anything but themselves as surface. Whatever there is — it’s all there to see but in the form of an incomprehensible, Kafkaesque glossiness, written in extraterrestrial code, perhaps subject to secret legislation."

"A small team of workers at a New York based non-profit organization called Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF) has announced its intention to build an "Outernet"—a global network of cube satellites broadcasting Internet data to virtually any person on the planet—for free. The idea, the MDIF website says, is to offer free Internet access to all people, regardless of location, bypassing filtering or other means of censorship."

"Once you configure your browser, requests to blocked websites will be seamlessly routed via the Immunicity cloud to get unblocked. All other requests will go directly to their destination, without being routed through our servers."

"Recently, the global financial market experienced a series of computer glitches that abruptly brought operations to a halt. One reason for these "flash freezes" may be the sudden emergence of mobs of ultrafast robots, which trade on the global markets and operate at speeds beyond human capability, thus overwhelming the system. The appearance of this "ultrafast machine ecology" is documented in a new study published on September 11 in Nature Scientific Reports."

“Connect with your fans”: as much as the internet and social networks have helped bring artists and fans closer and even cut out the middleman in some cases, the act of artists connecting with their fans on an increasingly frequent basis has morphed into a command to be permanently available, leaving the artist less time, less life experience to make music. Counter-productive, to say the least.

"This is the Daytrotter model, essentially. Active since 2006, the site records bands “live, in a studio, with no overdubs, auto tune or remixing,” and fans can listen to the sessions in real time (upcoming sessions) or later, using the archives. Daytrotter — not the band, or their record label — owns these sound recordings. So far, it has over 2,000 sessions you won’t find on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, Rdio, or any other commercial service, other than DayTrotter. Users can subscribe after a seven day free trial. The cost: $2 per month, after a seven day trial. Daytrotter switched to this model last year, making more sessions available as it added the subscription requirement."

"The postmodern world is obscene since everything is made visible, broadcast, and so forth. The Internet is obscene because it is characterized by endless information and communication as well as never-ending social commentary..."

"I’m simply now expecting people to give me their data to improve my life. The freeing of public data over the past ten years has been driven by geeks, it’s true, but their arguments were merely foreshadowing a general shift in the mindset of the population at large...We expect everything. And we expect it on our own terms."

You're engrossed in an interview on the Today programme but have to leave for work. No problem. Press the RadioTAG button on your radio to remember your place. When you get to work, you resume listening on iPlayer from the point you left off.

"So, the Adaptive Journey service I describe isn’t possible at the moment, because you can’t get at the user data without breaking TfL’s terms and conditions. Nevertheless, the “We see you’re doing this, perhaps you’d find it better to do that” design pattern is a powerful one, if used properly." Yeah, crossref with @TowerBridge there, Ben. good read, though.

“Google Street View is both the view from the machine (from the car, the Ballardian view-of-our-times) and the view of the machine (the way the machine sees). Overlayed with data augmentation, from a non-human-natural perspective (the roof of the car), slightly lensed (fish-eyed), wholly networked.”

"“Iran will soon create an internet that conforms to Islamic principles, to improve its communication and trade links with the world,” he said, apparently explaining that the new network would operate in parallel to the regular Internet and would possibly eventually replace the open Internet in Muslim countries in the regions."

"Photojournalists pitch their projects directly to the public. You get to decide whether a story is worth doing. By agreeing to back a story, for a minimum contribution of $10, you are making sure that the issues that you care about receive the in-depth coverage they deserve. In return you are invited along on the journey. Photojournalists on Emphas.is agree to enter into a direct dialogue with their backers, sharing their experiences and insights as the creative process unfolds."

"a new platform that allows anyone to record or upload audio, and then “pin” it to physical locations. Broadcastr then indexes and curates that audio for playback via Web or smartphone, where it can be filtered and shared in the usual ways."

"Blog-sponsored shows mark a shift in the music marketing industry, which has been transformed by the Internet. The shift from major-label marketing to building a devoted core of fans through word-of-mouth promotion is fueled by bloggers who champion their favorite artists."

"Robots could soon have an equivalent of the internet and Wikipedia. European scientists have embarked on a project to let robots share and store what they discover about the world. Called RoboEarth it will be a place that robots can upload data to when they master a task, and ask for help in carrying out new ones. Researchers behind it hope it will allow robots to come into service more quickly, armed with a growing library of knowledge about their human masters."